"There is plenty
of evidence that unemployment has many far-reaching effects other
than loss of income, including psychological harm, loss of work
motivation, skill and self-confidence, increase in ailments and
morbidity (and even mortality rates), disruption of family relations
and social life, hardening of social exclusion and accentuation
of racial tensions and gender asymmetries."
Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1999), pp.94-95. [Sen is winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize
in Economics.]

The
work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

"In truth, the average American
not only wants to work, but strives to do a good job. People don’t
want 20 hours a week; they want a real job—a full-time,
40-hour a week job. And it’s more than just the money. They
want a destination, a place to go when they get up in the morning,
something productive to give their lives structure. Such a pity
that even so modest a goal as having a full-time job is now considered
a “luxury.” David
Macaray, LA playwright and author and former union rep.

"I think one of the big wishes of
the human kind is to transform things, to work on things to construct,
to destroy, to sometimes construct again. And not only to look
at the world, let’s say, passively. I think that’s
the aim of humankind, being a man, a woman, is to change things."
Luc
Dardenne, filmmaker

“There is no worse material poverty than that of
not being able to earn one’s daily bread.” Unemployment
is not inevitable; it is, rather, “the result of a prior
social option and an economic system that values profits more
than people.....Ours is a culture of waste. This happens when
the god of money is at the center of an economic system, and not
the human person.....There are economic systems that have to make
war to survive. ....We have to [change the world] with courage,
but also with intelligence; with tenacity, but without fanaticism;
with passion, but without violence; and all together, confronting
conflicts, without being ensnared in them--striving to resolve
tensions to reach a higher level of unity, peace, and justice.”
Pope
Francis

"While unemployment is an ordeal for anyone, it
still appears to be more traumatic for men. Men without jobs are
more likely to commit crimes and go to prison. They are less likely
to wed, more likely to divorce, and more likely to father a child
out of wedlock. Ironically, unemployed men tend to do even less
housework than men with jobs and often retreat from family life...."
"The Slow Disappearance of the American Working Man,"
Mike
Dorning, Bloomberg Business